Explorers first discovered Homo floresiensis bones in 2003, in
Flores Island's Liang Bua limestone cave. The diminutive species
stood at just 3.5 feet tall, and archaeologists believe they
evolved from early human ancestors who became marooned on the
island at least a million years ago.

Previous research suggested that the hobbits died out between
11,000 and 13,000 years ago — tens of thousands of years after
humans first arrived on the island.

However, further archaeological excavation of the cave suggests
the hobbit people vanished much earlier than that, closer to
50,000 years ago.

The research team, consisting of Indonesian scientists and
researchers from Griffith University, used uranium-thorium dating
to provide an estimated age of the fossilized remains.

The earliest bones and simple tools tested by the team date back
about 60,000 years. Meanwhile, all of the fossils cease above a
50,000-year-old layer of the cavern — around the same time modern
humans probably arrived.

Study coauthor Adam Brumm thinks that hobbit people went the way
of our other human cousins,
Neanderthals and
Denisovans. Once homo sapiens made it to Flores, we
out-competed our human-like kin in only a few thousand years.

"They might have retreated to more remote parts of Flores, but
it’s a small place and they couldn't have avoided our species for
long," Brumm said in a Griffith University
press release. "I think their days were numbered the moment
we set foot on the island."

Our ancestors disrupted many archaic humans in our unstoppable
spread across the planet. And in the case of Homo floresiensis,
these new results hint we out-competed them startlingly fast.